


Misplaced

by finchandsparrow



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Emotional Baggage, Episode: s12e02 Mamma Mia, Family Dynamics, Gen, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Less-Than-Fulfilling Family Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26762524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finchandsparrow/pseuds/finchandsparrow
Summary: Dean facilitated a divine family reunion and God’s sister gifted him John Winchester. The world is upside-down—but they’ve rescued Sam, and doesn’t the world somehow (always) hinge on him? For the prompt: Season 12 Au where John was brought back to life instead of Mary.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & John Winchester, Dean Winchester & John Winchester & Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, John Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 15
Kudos: 78
Collections: Supernatural Summergen 2018





	Misplaced

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnotherWriterWhoWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnotherWriterWhoWrites/gifts).



John Winchester is alive, and Sam doesn’t say anything the entire drive back to Lebanon. Sometimes he’s sleeping, but most of the time he’s pretending to. Dean knows the difference. John doesn’t. Maybe it’s been too long; or, maybe, he just never knew. Dean couldn’t tell you right now. Memory becomes unreliable when the past is sitting shotgun in your car.

“Looks like he’s gonna be okay,” John says, and it’s a pronouncement, like he _knows_. They’re an hour out from their midpoint gas stop, where Sam had silently shrugged off Dean’s hovering hands and hobbled to the restroom on his own.

“Still that stubborn,” John had said; and Dean replied, “You have no idea.” Dean wishes he hadn’t said that: it planted questions. John wouldn’t ask them—not yet—but they would smolder for now and flare up later. John is too much like Sam, in that way. Or, at least, too much like Sam used to be.

The thing is, Sam _is_ going to be okay. Sam’s going to be okay because Sam’s always okay. Sam’s always okay because he has to be; he’s never okay because he should be. When John says _okay_ , when John says _stubborn_ , he means that Sam’s going to come out on some other side. That’s not Sam anymore: Sam stays on the same side and convinces himself it’s survivable until it is. That’s Sam’s _stubborn_. That’s Sam’s _okay_.

John hasn’t said a word to Sam.

“Yeah, he’ll be alright,” says Dean. He can’t remember whether Sam’s asleep or faking. Dad’s presence stretches from the shotgun seat like a shutter. For a long moment Dean can’t hear Sam’s breathing past it.

* * *

When they get back to the bunker, Dean pulls Sam up and slings his arm across his shoulders. Dad moves toward them. Sam shakes his head minutely and touches fingertips to his ribs, as if in explanation or apology. John takes a step back.

“Get the bags?” says Dean, and John does, quick and quiet, with that effortless competence that makes Dean’s back straighten in response. John walks ahead of them and disappears deliberately behind the door.

Sam and Dean take a step together, and another. Sam’s left leg gives out. He catches himself with his right, grunts and stumbles forward again—burn, bullet wound, burn. He swears, voice blunted by exhaustion.

“You good?” Dean says, after a second.

Sam takes another step forward.

Dean braces himself to be the support that Sam may only accept when his consciousness gives out. He can feel Sam’s muscles shaking, the shuddery heaves of his lungs. “Friggin’ bastard,” Dean mutters.

“Cas?” says Sam, too quickly.

Dean lets his agitation power his voice. “Where the hell is he, singing soprano with the heavenly boychoir? We could use him right now.”

During the beat of silence that follows, Dean waits for Sam, waits for Sam to laugh, waits for Sam to criticize his use of the word “use.” Waits for Sam to need him, for that need to cancel out the cognitive thrum of another presence beyond the doorway.

But Sam only says, drily: “I don’t think he’s got his ears on.”

Dean curses Cas again, silently, for being the savior his brother asked for.

They’re almost to the door. “Sam—”

“Dean, I just need to sleep. I just—” Sam stops walking and starts to take one of those huge, resetting Sam-breaths, but the inhale catches halfway and he deflates instead. He turns his head so that Dean can’t see his eyes, just the end of the cut along his cheekbone, the muscles tensing near the corner of his mouth. “I just want to go to bed.” He sounds all of 5 years old. He sounds all of 5,000 years old.

A stupid joke, ten of them, jump to the tip of Dean’s tongue—teasing, easy, familiar. Feeling sick, he takes a moment to swallow them, literally. Sam doesn’t want camaraderie; Sam wants to shut him out. “Can do, little brother,” is all Dean can think to say.

They walk, painstakingly, to Sam’s room. John is out of sight. Relief removes the tension from Dean’s shoulders and disappointment resettles it in his core.

He suddenly becomes aware of Sam’s heavy breathing, of the weight of him dragging on his neck. When Dean lowers him to sit on the bed, Sam collapses backward onto the mattress with a groan.

“Pills?”

“That sounds great,” says Sam. His voice shakes and he lays an arm across his face in a belated attempt to hide his pain. When was the last time he’d had painkillers? Shit. How could Dean not know?

Dean all but tiptoes back to Sam’s room, keeps the pills from rattling, hopes Sam is already halfway to snooze city. But Sam is sitting up, hand to his mouth like he’s biting his fingernails. It’s a habit of Sam’s from age 17, 18, when he was holding back more than he would say and itching to run out on them. It seemed that every time Dean had found him like that, knee bouncing and jaw clenched, Sam would spring up and stalk away, separating himself by door or distance.

Today, Sam doesn’t walk out. Sam asks for sleeping pills.

“Sure, we should have some.”

“Bathroom?”

“Yeah. Hey, where’re you limping off to?”

“I don’t need you to hold my hand while I piss, Dean.”

Sam shambles down the hallway with a hand against the wall. Dean squeezes his fists around the useless bottles of painkillers that shouldn’t be taken with sleep aids and tries to make the plastic give. When he puts the pills in his pocket and stretches his fingers, they won’t stay still. He crosses his arms tight, presses his forehead against the wall while he waits.

Dad is in the bunker. It’s less a fact than a feeling, less a feeling than a belief without a guiding text, an instinct in the wrong body. Dean fears (hopes?) that Dad will come over to make sure things are all right. He suspects (he knows) Dad would makes things worse.

He meets Sam in the hallway, hooks an arm around his waist. “Those drugs kick in yet?”

“I wish.” The humor in his voice has gone grey.

Dean sits Sam on the bed and goes straight back to the bathroom, scans the shelves, finds the sleeping pills and shakes the bottle. He’s met with a sparse rattle. Last he knew, the bottle had been full, hadn’t it? Hadn’t the bottle been full?

Sam’s already stretched out on the bed. He looks like someone unaccustomed to lying down and trying hard to pass for normal.

Dean holds up the bottle. The four pills inside slide neatly to one side; his hands, his chest, his voice have gone steel-solid. “How many did you take?”

Sam squints at him. “Two,” he says. Quiet, pained, questioning. Not lying.

Dean’s ribcage unlocks; more air spills in than he thinks he needs. He considers apologizing, in case he was too… too _something_. He scraps that idea—he’s not even sure what he would be apologizing for. Instead he opens the bottle, taps a pill into his hand. “Make it three,” he says, and tosses the pill to Sam. Sam catches it deftly with his left hand and looks at Dean. His expression, Dean decides, is too altered by pain and exhaustion to decipher. Sam props himself up on an elbow and looks down at the pill in his palm for several seconds. He dry-swallows it without comment.

Dean sets the sleeping pills on the nightstand, and the ibuprofen next to that. He fills a cup at the sink and sets it next to the pills. He wants to get Sam in clean, comfortable clothes, get Sam’s wounds in fresh bandages; but Sam’s staring straight up like he’s using every ounce of his remaining energy to summon oblivion from the ceiling.

Dad’s in the bunker.

Dean isn’t sure what to say—what to _not_ say—to his brother. He clears his throat. “Anything else you need?”

“I’m okay,” says Sam absently. He’s holding his hand like the pill stung him when he caught it.

Dean hovers at the doorway. He opens his mouth and potential words shuffle over each other in his brain, collapse and flatten. "Well,” he finally manages, “sleep tight.” The line about bed bugs threatens to tumble out—senseless and automatic, someone else’s words—and he turns to go before it does.

"Hey, Dean?"

He turns back.

"I'm glad you're not dead."

There’s an apology in Sam’s cadence, in the underside of it. There’s a plea in there somewhere, too: in his gaze, bleary but intense. It’s a weird sentence, Dean thinks; but then, maybe it’s not. They’ve been through a lot. They’ve said weirder.

"You too," says Dean. He doesn’t know if those were the right words. "Bitch," he adds, and it's the only thing he's said all day that felt right.

Something in Sam's face collapses around his mouth; something around his eyebrows tightens. "Jerk," he replies. The word comes out warped. He’s looking at the ceiling again.

* * *

John is at a table in the library, paging through a book with frayed binding and faded ink. He looks up and his face is photograph-familiar. He hasn’t aged since that day in the hospital.

“Sam’s okay?” Dad says.

Dean nods. “Sam’s okay.” A decade’s worth of fresh lies—and two decades’ worth of stale ones before that—pull on that statement, but Dean says it for its fractional truth. The Winchesters have always spoken in code.

Dean tells John the part of the story he needs to hear, Cliffs Notes over beers. Sam hadn’t gone darkside. Dean had watched out for him, Sam was stronger than the demons. He made it. The world tried to end, and they refused to play along with their fates; they tricked the devil and, heaven and hell against them, they stopped the apocalypse. That’s what Dean says about it: they stopped the apocalypse.

“So,” John summarizes, taking a swallow from his bottle, 1970s-young and father-old: “you won.”

Dean thinks of Sam, jaw slack and head lolling, of cold mud saturating the knees of their jeans. Of the brimstone brunette at the crossroads whose mouth was only human-warm, of little brother asking, “How could you do that?” Of Sam screaming when the hellhound tore through Dean’s gut, of Sam screaming in the panic room for the poison he’d been cursed to crave, of Dean screaming without screaming while Sam stood at the mouth of hell and didn’t scream, surrendered himself to the Pit like he deserved it, arms spread and eyes closed. Sam missing a piece, Sam whole again but remembering too much, Sam biting his cheek and squeezing his palm when he thought Dean wasn’t looking. Sam collapsing trial-wrecked in that chapel, Sam claiming he’d been “ready to die,” Sam broken-shouldered and worn thin from tracking down Dean’s demon ass. Sam baring his neck for Dean’s scythe. Sam praying to God and getting Lucifer.

_I win. So, I win._

Save Sam, destroy him, save the world, damn the world: they’re all the same thing, in the end. Dean has only ever tried to do one of them.

Sam might not be sleeping. Dean doesn’t know. There was a time when he could tell, walls be damned. There was a time when the walls didn’t exist.

You won, Dad had said. He smiles; his eyes water; he looks proud.

Dean waits for him to lean in and whisper a terrible secret.

“Yes, sir,” Dean says, chokes. “We won.”


End file.
